I shall review psychophysical and fMRI evidence for a hierarchy of intermediate processing stages in the ventral or form vision system. A review of receptive field sizes from V1 up to TE indicates an increase in diameter by a factor of about 3.0 from area to area. This is consistent with configural combination of adjacent orientations to form curves or angles, followed by combination of curves and angles to form descriptors of object shapes. Psychophysical and fMRI evidence support this hypothesis, and neural models provide a plausible explanation of this hierarchical configural processing.